On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision SEARCHING FOR THE SECRET OF 'DALLAS' BY MARVIN KITMAN T he biggest preoccupation of TV programmers this season has been searching for a new Dallas, which has come to represent El...
...But Forsythe the bad guy...
...The show is well-produced, well-acted, well-written, and often quite educational...
...He has always stood for everything wholesome in the American way of TV...
...My own special interest in this show is Linda Evans, who is engaged to John Forsythe, I mean Blake Carrington...
...Howard Duff as Sherrif Titus Semple has the juiciest role in all the Dallas clones...
...That's exactly how I would do it, too, if I had $200 million...
...The town's motel became Grand Central Station with all the comings and goings...
...She is famous for being the former Bo Derek, and yes, she is incredibly gorgeous, spellbinding, a woman worth owning a TV set just to watch??an 11 on a scale of 10...
...They're just walking through their parts, of course, but at least they can walk...
...slime TV has to grow on you, like mold...
...Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons...
...In that opening episode, Gary was going to find a job as a salesman in Fairgate's showroom...
...Where did they go wrong...
...That kind of naked power is what it's all about in Western civilization, and in Dallas the dirty linen of the rich hangs right out there on the clothesline??a thrilling sociological documentary...
...Then the show started to get tasteless...
...EST) avoids the tedium of small towns by taking place in Denver...
...So Dynasty and Flamingo Road still have to prove themselves to me...
...Some of this year's models have sprouted fins, though...
...Don't get me wrong, small towns can make for absorbing literature...
...Midland Heights was the kind of place TV viewers want to leave on a Saturday night, not stay home and watch...
...It suffered initially because it was about the oil business, and comparisons with Dallas were inevitable...
...That 'swhatissowonderful about Dallas...
...Dynasty (ABC, Monday, 9 p.m...
...In shows like The Dopes of Hazzard, you may love the two dopes, the car, or even Catherine Bach (the one in hot shorts who always wears panty hose...
...Imagine, Linda is the one John Derek dumped because she was too old...
...EST...
...ABC has Dynasty (Dallas-in-Den-ver...
...The closest imitator of the Ewing family, Dynasty is produced by that man of exquisite taste, the noted cultural titan Aaron Spelling(Vegas, Charlie'sAngels...
...But the sherrif s manipulations do have the ring of authenticity, and in between there's lots of sex and violence...
...It'slikeanold JoanCraw-ford movie...
...and the other Ewings??a house in Knots Landing, California, as a wedding present...
...Ewing...
...What is so hard for those dummies in the television industry to find...
...The real problem, though, was the flawed conception of the show...
...Lorenzo Lamas (the son of Ricardo Montalban or maybe Fernando Cordoba??I get all those TV car salesmen mixed up) impersonated a piece of wood, and the rest of the cast was no better than that of a good high school production...
...With one phone call he saw to it that the man couldn't work at a single law firm from Dallas to Atlanta...
...In the opening scene of the December 4, 1980 premiere, two teenagers were smooching in a parking lot during the big homecoming football game, followed by humid smooching in the hospital room where the football star lay with a possible concussion (probably from trying to see what was going on in the parking lot...
...Dynasty, which was created by two respected writers, Esther and Richard Shapiro, had its premiere January 12...
...Later, a big nighttime hayride had 900 high school kids smooching under the straw...
...This is hardly something we need from television...
...A regular family night...
...Knots Landing, in contrast, is just plain suburban folks lusting for power...
...John Forsythe plays the oil tycoon, the show's J.R...
...EST...
...On top of that, Forsythe's latest contribution to American culture has been playing the voice of Charlie Townsend, head of the private detective agency in Charlie'sAngels...
...You can feel the slothful heat and sense the raw, malevolent power of the town's eminence blanc, bobbing back and forth, scheming, manipulating...
...and big troubles (daughter is in love with Daddy, son is gay...
...Ewing tips $200,000 yearly...
...The family assets include a pro football team...
...l. am also fascinated by another January opener, Flamingo Road (NBC, Tuesday, 10 p.m...
...the ratings declined and the show was canceled in January...
...He is a first-class mean son of a bitch, the best bad guy on TV since J.R...
...Midland Heights was a small town...
...On TV, all small towns look alike...
...ve GotaSecrefwas more of a turn-on, I thought, and my reaction proved accurate...
...The ridicule and scathing denunciations in my notes, though, have been dwindling as the weeks go by...
...To cast him against type constitutes a circuitry overload that threatens to cause burnouts nationwide...
...The difference between trash and high-class trash is not a matter of sex and sordid doings...
...Daytime soaps have used the same principle since the invention of radio...
...We get to peek through the windows of our economic betters and glimpse how the wealthy and powerful live...
...I'll watch about 20-30 episodes and let you know my final judgment on these disgusting, sexy, raunchy shows...
...Millions of middle-aging hearts palpitate when they see him, even on commercials...
...NBC is hot and heavy on the trail with Flamingo Road (??to/ta-in-Flori-da...
...We see the political machinations of a corrupt sherrif pro-peling his protege, the old judge's son, into the Tallahassee State House and the governorship, or the sherrif s name ain't Titus Semple...
...Everything they touch turns smarmy...
...Except underneath all that blubber Orson has agood heart...
...In his white planter's suit he reminds me of Orson (I-will-eat-no-cow-before-its-time) Welles, back in his movie days...
...But would Sinclair Lewis have done a whole series about his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota...
...To begin with, you can blame the poor writing and the acting...
...The show chronicles the Denver oil empire of the Blake Carrington family, and it has everything: big cars, big houses (the family cottage has 48 rooms), big income (Carrington is worth 200 million clams??is that after taxes...
...The town where Gary and his new bride, Valene, took up residence in the place at thecul-de-sac turned out to be a typical California upper-middle class suburban community??lots of parties, with everyone coveting his neighbor's wife and other worldly goods...
...Yet Midland Heights was produced by the House of Lorimar itself??Lee Rich and David Jacobs, the founding fathers of Dallas...
...Being able to buy the kids any house they want is what makes the rich different from you and me and F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...So he flies her to San Francisco's Chinatown in his private jet for a little dinner...
...And CBS thought this was another Dallas1...
...The seamy side of the street is what the producers??Lorimar again??capture so well, ably assisted by a very good cast that features several old pros like Barbara Rush and Kevin McCarthy, who plays the town's big mill owner...
...Midland Heights was the F.W...
...But that's not all there is to successful sleaze TV...
...Duffs sherrif Semple, behind that porkish exterior, is a depraved pig...
...When he sits on the porch in a white suit, rocking away, you can hear the seat of power squeaking as if it were alive...
...The man is not merely an actor, he is a symbol, a romantic figure...
...but at the end of each episode you don't wonder what's going to happen to them next week...
...But who cared about Sid Fairgate, a runny-nosed auto mechanic who had risen to running his own car agency...
...The search for the new Dallas actually began way back on December 27, 1979, with the spinoff from the original series called Knots Landing (CBS, Thursday, 10 p.m...
...They simply couldn't do it again...
...You may remember, or maybe you don't, that Miss Elly gave her son Gary??a no-account, gambling drunk who couldn't handle living at home with J.R...
...and CBS had Secrets of Midland Heights (??to//as-in-a-small-Michigan-college-town-not-Ann-Arbor...
...Couldn't such bright minds come up with any other business...
...This basic storytelling principle, discovered, I believe, by Scheherezade, is a matter of leaving them wanting more...
...Come on, they must be kidding...
...Very grubby...
...You are either born there or need an awful lot of money to buy your way in...
...They have no real character because television scripts are written by Beverly Hillsillies??urbane, polished guys floating around in their pools of Perrier water, trying to see back to their roots as old country boys, through their silvered sunglasses...
...This is the story of a steamy Southern town, a veritable Slimesville, USA...
...Flamingo Road is the best street in town, "paved," as the promos pant, with "deceit and broken hearts...
...I stopped watching it after 20-30 episodes...
...and Dallas is like a course in Applied Plutocratic Behavior at the University of Texas School of Social Work...
...OnTelevision SEARCHING FOR THE SECRET OF 'DALLAS' BY MARVIN KITMAN T he biggest preoccupation of TV programmers this season has been searching for a new Dallas, which has come to represent El Dorado in the minds of television executives...
...It concerns the world of oil, sex and power (or was that sex, power and oil...
...Upon catching a young lawyer in flagrante with his mistress, for instance, J.R...
...If you're going to be a voyeur, I always say, you should look for the unknown...
...Woolworth's gourmet department of Dallas spinoffs...
...The only exercise he ever gets is picking up his graft...
...When Forsythe takes Linda out to dinner he asks where to...
...The first family we got to study at Knots Landing was the Fairgates, the neighborhood Brady Bunch...
...Still to come, no doubt, are Dallases in Fort Worth, Houston, San Diego, Anaheim, Hartsdale, Chappaqua, and Hastings-on-the-Hudson...
...The Secrets of Midland Heights on CBSwastoDo/towhat Texas??NBC's daytime Dallas clone??is to General Hospital: not much...
...Please, nothing expensive," she says, and picks Chinese...
...Talk about gross...
...When Dallas came on it was the only prime-time show with a story that continued from week to week, so that you cared about what was going to happen...
...The press complicates matters by calling almost everything that moves a Dallas clone??as if Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop were another Char-lene Tilton...
...At times it plays like something Robert Penn Warren might have thrown out of All the King's Men because it was too commercial...
...Why, J.R...
...All problems are unnaturally resolved in an hour, unlike real life, where they tend to schlep on interminably...
...What a laugh...
...just smiled evilly...
...These notes on Dynasty and Flamingo Road are tentative, but there is more to their grunge than the heavy breathing mMidlandHeightsandKnotsLand-ing...
...Humdrum...
...It doesn't seem such a big deal...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 3
